Editorial: First success for 'parent trigger' shouldn't be the last

2013-01-15 16:22:54

In recent days, these pages have given repeated attention to a disheartening new report from the education group StudentsFirst, which identified California as a national laggard in education reform. This has been the source of considerable, and justifiable, anxiety. The report's emphases on California's failure to hold teachers accountable, provide a quality education to students and facilitate meaningful school choice all receive our resounding approval.

Nevertheless, we should also note that there was one exceedingly bright spot in the report. California received high marks for its first-in-the-nation parent-trigger law, which allows a majority of parents at an underperforming school to band together and mandate reform, up to and including transforming the campus into a charter school. That Golden State legislators managed to pass this law three years ago despite the dominance at the Capitol of the state's teacher unions remains one of the rare moments in recent history when Sacramento earned our unqualified gratitude.

The magnitude of that accomplishment was put into poignant relief when, just a day after the StudentsFirst report was released, parents of children attending Desert Trails Elementary School in San Bernardino County became the first in the state to win approval for converting their school into a charter. This is a source of hope for the parents of Desert Trails students, who were attending a school ranked in the bottom 10 percent of California campuses, with academic performance continuing to decline.

As the Desert Trails experience demonstrates, implementing reform can be an arduous process. The fight to convert the school into a charter took 18 months to resolve, with the school district's Board of Trustees rejecting the initial petition despite its widespread support from parents. In the end, both a lawsuit and a new round of school board elections were necessary to implement reform.

Alas, we're not surprised. The resistance to accountability among the educational establishment is always vigorous – and, in some instances, truly repugnant. When parents at a failing school in Compton recently tried to use the trigger, Hispanic parents reported being threatened by anti-charter teachers with deportation if they dared sign the petition.

While this behavior is reprehensible, it is only a symptom of a deeper structural problem. As long as the public school system is a virtual monopoly, children will continue to be shortchanged. Providers of any service take their customers for granted when they're insulated from competition.

Thus, we encourage more parents throughout California to stand up for their children's rights. And we exhort government to help them. In the short term, Sacramento can help by lifting arbitrary caps on charter schools and the use of the parent trigger. In the long run, state government can take groundbreaking steps like offering opportunity scholarships that allow the state's poorest children to attend the school of their choice – public or private.

For too long, our state's schools have focused on the desires of employees and administrators to the detriment of children. Any future reforms that don't put students first are unworthy of a state as great as ours.